OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, i.e. sentences with shorter dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language.
SPF-CellTracker: Tracking multiple cells with strongly-correlated moves using a spatial particle filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Tracking many cells in time-lapse 3D image sequences is an important challenging task of bioimage informatics. Motivated by a study of brain-wide 4D imaging of neural activity in C. elegans, we present a new method of multi-cell tracking. Data types to which the method is applicable are characterized as follows: (i) cells are imaged as globular-like objects, (ii) it is difficult to distinguish cells based only on shape and size, (iii) the number of imaged cells ranges in several hundreds, (iv) moves of nearly-located cells are strongly correlated and (v) cells do not divide. We developed a tracking software suite which we call SPF-CellTracker. Incorporating dependency on cells' moves into prediction model is the key to reduce the tracking errors: cell-switching and coalescence of tracked positions. We model target cells' correlated moves as a Markov random field and we also derive a fast computation algorithm, which we call spatial particle filter. With the live-imaging data of nuclei of C. elegans neurons in which approximately 120 nuclei of neurons are imaged, we demonstrate an advantage of the proposed method over the standard particle filter and a method developed by Tokunaga et al. (2014).
Consensus Convergence with Stochastic Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

We consider a stochastic, continuous state and time opinion model where each agent's opinion locally interacts with other agents' opinions in the system, and there is also exogenous randomness. The interaction tends to create clusters of common opinion. By using linear stability analysis of the associated nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation that governs the empirical density of opinions in the limit of infinitely many agents, we can estimate the number of clusters, the time to cluster formation and the critical strength of randomness so as to have cluster formation. We also discuss the cluster dynamics after their formation, the width and the effective diffusivity of the clusters. Finally, the long term behavior of clusters is explored numerically. Extensive numerical simulations confirm our analytical findings.
Transposition of Notations in Just Intonation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2016
Year: 2016

A notation system was previously presented which can notate any rational frequency in free Just Intonation. Transposition of music is carried out by multiplying each member of a set of frequencies by a single frequency. Transposition of JI notations up by a fixed amount requires multiplication to be defined for any two notations. Transposition down requires inversion to be defined for any notation, which allows division to also be defined for any two notations. Each notation splits into four components which in decreasing size order are octave, diatonic scale note, sharps or flats, rational comma adjustment. Multiplication can be defined for each of the four notation components. Since rational number multiplication is commutative, this leads to a definition of multiplication for frequencies and thus notations. Examples of notation inversion and multiplication are given. Examples of transposing melodies are given. These are checked for accuracy using the rational numbers which each notation represents. Calculation shortcuts are considered which make notation operations quicker to carry out by hand. A question regarding whether rational commas should be extended from 5-rough rational numbers to all rational numbers is considered which would greatly simplify notation multiplication. This approach is rejected since it leads to confusion about octave number. The four component notation system is recommended instead. Extensions to computer notation systems and stave representations are briefly mentioned.
Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Centrality is one of the most studied concepts in social network analysis. There is a huge literature regarding centrality measures, as ways to identify the most relevant users in a social network. The challenge is to find measures that can be computed efficiently, and that can be able to classify the users according to relevance criteria as close as possible to reality. We address this problem in the context of the Twitter network, an online social networking service with millions of users and an impressive flow of messages that are published and spread daily by interactions between users. Twitter has different types of users, but the greatest utility lies in finding the most influential ones. The purpose of this article is to collect and classify the different Twitter influence measures that exist so far in literature. These measures are very diverse. Some are based on simple metrics provided by the Twitter API, while others are based on complex mathematical models. Several measures are based on the PageRank algorithm, traditionally used to rank the websites on the Internet. Some others consider the timeline of publication, others the content of the messages, some are focused on specific topics, and others try to make predictions. We consider all these aspects, and some additional ones. Furthermore, we include measures of activity and popularity, the traditional mechanisms to correlate measures, and some important aspects of computational complexity for this particular context.
FlatCam: Thin, Bare-Sensor Cameras using Coded Aperture and Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

FlatCam is a thin form-factor lensless camera that consists of a coded mask placed on top of a bare, conventional sensor array. Unlike a traditional, lens-based camera where an image of the scene is directly recorded on the sensor pixels, each pixel in FlatCam records a linear combination of light from multiple scene elements. A computational algorithm is then used to demultiplex the recorded measurements and reconstruct an image of the scene. FlatCam is an instance of a coded aperture imaging system; however, unlike the vast majority of related work, we place the coded mask extremely close to the image sensor that can enable a thin system. We employ a separable mask to ensure that both calibration and image reconstruction are scalable in terms of memory requirements and computational complexity. We demonstrate the potential of the FlatCam design using two prototypes: one at visible wavelengths and one at infrared wavelengths.
AMON: An Open Source Architecture for Online Monitoring, Statistical Analysis and Forensics of Multi-gigabit Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

The Internet, as a global system of interconnected networks, carries an extensive array of information resources and services. Key requirements include good quality-of-service and protection of the infrastructure from nefarious activity (e.g. distributed denial of service--DDoS--attacks). Network monitoring is essential to network engineering, capacity planning and prevention / mitigation of threats. We develop an open source architecture, AMON (All-packet MONitor), for online monitoring and analysis of multi-gigabit network streams. It leverages the high-performance packet monitor PF RING and is readily deployable on commodity hardware. AMON examines all packets, partitions traffic into sub-streams by using rapid hashing and computes certain real-time data products. The resulting data structures provide views of the intensity and connectivity structure of network traffic at the time-scale of routing. The proposed integrated framework includes modules for the identification of heavy-hitters as well as for visualization and statistical detection at the time-of-onset of high impact events such as DDoS. This allows operators to quickly visualize and diagnose attacks, and limit offline and time consuming post-mortem analysis. We demonstrate our system in the context of real-world attack incidents, and validate it against state-of-the-art alternatives. AMON has been deployed and is currently processing 10Gbps+ live Internet traffic at Merit Network. It is extensible and allows the addition of further statistical and filtering modules for real-time forensics.
User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks are envisioned to support the deluge of data traffic with reduced energy consumption and improved quality of service (QoS) provision. To this end, the key enabling technologies, such as heterogeneous networks (HetNets), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and millimeter wave (mmWave) techniques, are identified to bring 5G to fruition. Regardless of the technology adopted, a user association mechanism is needed to determine whether a user is associated with a particular base station (BS) before the data transmission commences. User association plays a pivotal role in enhancing the load balancing, the spectrum efficiency and the energy efficiency of networks. The emerging 5G networks introduce numerous challenges and opportunities for the design of sophisticated user association mechanisms. Hence, substantial research efforts are dedicated to the issues of user association in HetNets, massive MIMO networks, mmWave networks and energy harvesting networks. We introduce a taxonomy as a framework for systematically studying the existing user association algorithms. Based on the proposed taxonomy, we then proceed to present an extensive overview of the state-of-the-art in user association conceived for HetNets, massive MIMO, mmWave and energy harvesting networks. Finally, we summarize the challenges as well as opportunities of user association in 5G and provide design guidelines and potential solutions for sophisticated user association mechanisms.
Encoding Prior Knowledge with Eigenword Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a method for reducing the dimension of data represented using two views. It has been previously used to derive word embeddings, where one view indicates a word, and the other view indicates its context. We describe a way to incorporate prior knowledge into CCA, give a theoretical justification for it, and test it by deriving word embeddings and evaluating them on a myriad of datasets.
A Dataset for Improved RGBD-based Object Detection and Pose Estimation for Warehouse Pick-and-Place
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

An important logistics application of robotics involves manipulators that pick-and-place objects placed in warehouse shelves. A critical aspect of this task corre- sponds to detecting the pose of a known object in the shelf using visual data. Solving this problem can be assisted by the use of an RGB-D sensor, which also provides depth information beyond visual data. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging problem since multiple issues need to be addressed, such as low illumination inside shelves, clutter, texture-less and reflective objects as well as the limitations of depth sensors. This paper provides a new rich data set for advancing the state-of-the-art in RGBD- based 3D object pose estimation, which is focused on the challenges that arise when solving warehouse pick- and-place tasks. The publicly available data set includes thousands of images and corresponding ground truth data for the objects used during the first Amazon Picking Challenge at different poses and clutter conditions. Each image is accompanied with ground truth information to assist in the evaluation of algorithms for object detection. To show the utility of the data set, a recent algorithm for RGBD-based pose estimation is evaluated in this paper. Based on the measured performance of the algorithm on the data set, various modifications and improvements are applied to increase the accuracy of detection. These steps can be easily applied to a variety of different methodologies for object pose detection and improve performance in the domain of warehouse pick-and-place.
Proximal Multitask Learning over Networks with Sparsity-inducing Coregularization
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

In this work, we consider multitask learning problems where clusters of nodes are interested in estimating their own parameter vector. Cooperation among clusters is beneficial when the optimal models of adjacent clusters have a good number of similar entries. We propose a fully distributed algorithm for solving this problem. The approach relies on minimizing a global mean-square error criterion regularized by non-differentiable terms to promote cooperation among neighboring clusters. A general diffusion forward-backward splitting strategy is introduced. Then, it is specialized to the case of sparsity promoting regularizers. A closed-form expression for the proximal operator of a weighted sum of $\ell_1$-norms is derived to achieve higher efficiency. We also provide conditions on the step-sizes that ensure convergence of the algorithm in the mean and mean-square error sense. Simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the strategy.
Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

This article offers an empirical exploration on the use of character-level convolutional networks (ConvNets) for text classification. We constructed several large-scale datasets to show that character-level convolutional networks could achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results. Comparisons are offered against traditional models such as bag of words, n-grams and their TFIDF variants, and deep learning models such as word-based ConvNets and recurrent neural networks.
Mean Capacity of Spatially Semi-Correlated MIMO Fading Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This study investigates the mean capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for spatially semi-correlated flat fading channels. In reality, the capacity degrades dramatic due to the channel covariance (CC) when correlations exist at the transmitter or receiver or on both sides. Most existing works have so far considered the traditional channel covariance matrices that have not been entirely constructed. Thus, we propose an iterative channel covariance (ICC) matrix using a matrix splitting (MS) technique with a guaranteed zero correlations coefficient in the case of the downlink correlated MIMO channel, to maximize the mean capacity. Our numerical results show that the proposed ICC method achieves the maximum channel gains with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios.
Newtonized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit: Frequency Estimation over the Continuum
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a fast sequential algorithm for the fundamental problem of estimating frequencies and amplitudes of a noisy mixture of sinusoids. The algorithm is a natural generalization of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) to the continuum using Newton refinements, and hence is termed Newtonized OMP (NOMP). Each iteration consists of two phases: detection of a new sinusoid, and sequential Newton refinements of the parameters of already detected sinusoids. The refinements play a critical role in two ways: (1) sidestepping the potential basis mismatch from discretizing a continuous parameter space, (2) providing feedback for locally refining parameters estimated in previous iterations. We characterize convergence, and provide a Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) based termination criterion. By benchmarking against the Cramer Rao Bound, we show that NOMP achieves near-optimal performance under a variety of conditions. We compare the performance of NOMP with classical algorithms such as MUSIC and more recent Atomic norm Soft Thresholding (AST) and Lasso algorithms, both in terms of frequency estimation accuracy and run time.
Low-Complexity MIMO Precoding with Discrete Signals and Statistical CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we investigate the design of multiple-input multiple-output single-user precoders for finite-alphabet signals under the premise of statistical channel-state information at the transmitter. Based on an asymptotic expression for the mutual information of channels exhibiting antenna correlations, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm that radically reduces the computational load of existing approaches by orders of magnitude with only minimal losses in performance. The savings increase with the number of transmit antennas and with the cardinality of the signal alphabet, making it possible to supports values thereof that were unwieldy in existing solutions.
Source localization and denoising: a perspective from the TDOA space
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2016
Year: 2016

In this manuscript, we formulate the problem of denoising Time Differences of Arrival (TDOAs) in the TDOA space, i.e. the Euclidean space spanned by TDOA measurements. The method consists of pre-processing the TDOAs with the purpose of reducing the measurement noise. The complete set of TDOAs (i.e., TDOAs computed at all microphone pairs) is known to form a redundant set, which lies on a linear subspace in the TDOA space. Noise, however, prevents TDOAs from lying exactly on this subspace. We therefore show that TDOA denoising can be seen as a projection operation that suppresses the component of the noise that is orthogonal to that linear subspace. We then generalize the projection operator also to the cases where the set of TDOAs is incomplete. We analytically show that this operator improves the localization accuracy, and we further confirm that via simulation.
Asynchronous Distributed ADMM for Large-Scale Optimization- Part I: Algorithm and Convergence Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

Aiming at solving large-scale learning problems, this paper studies distributed optimization methods based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). By formulating the learning problem as a consensus problem, the ADMM can be used to solve the consensus problem in a fully parallel fashion over a computer network with a star topology. However, traditional synchronized computation does not scale well with the problem size, as the speed of the algorithm is limited by the slowest workers. This is particularly true in a heterogeneous network where the computing nodes experience different computation and communication delays. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous distributed ADMM (AD-AMM) which can effectively improve the time efficiency of distributed optimization. Our main interest lies in analyzing the convergence conditions of the AD-ADMM, under the popular partially asynchronous model, which is defined based on a maximum tolerable delay of the network. Specifically, by considering general and possibly non-convex cost functions, we show that the AD-ADMM is guaranteed to converge to the set of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points as long as the algorithm parameters are chosen appropriately according to the network delay. We further illustrate that the asynchrony of the ADMM has to be handled with care, as slightly modifying the implementation of the AD-ADMM can jeopardize the algorithm convergence, even under a standard convex setting.
Shape Interaction Matrix Revisited and Robustified: Efficient Subspace Clustering with Corrupted and Incomplete Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

The Shape Interaction Matrix (SIM) is one of the earliest approaches to performing subspace clustering (i.e., separating points drawn from a union of subspaces). In this paper, we revisit the SIM and reveal its connections to several recent subspace clustering methods. Our analysis lets us derive a simple, yet effective algorithm to robustify the SIM and make it applicable to realistic scenarios where the data is corrupted by noise. We justify our method by intuitive examples and the matrix perturbation theory. We then show how this approach can be extended to handle missing data, thus yielding an efficient and general subspace clustering algorithm. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach over state-of-the-art subspace clustering methods on several challenging motion segmentation and face clustering problems, where the data includes corrupted and missing measurements.
Inverse Dynamics with Rigid Contact and Friction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

Inverse dynamics is used extensively in robotics and biomechanics applications. In manipulator and legged robots, it can form the basis of an effective nonlinear control strategy by providing a robot with both accurate positional tracking and active compliance. In biomechanics applications, inverse dynamics control can approximately determine the net torques applied at anatomical joints that correspond to an observed motion. In the context of robot control, using inverse dynamics requires knowledge of all contact forces acting on the robot; accurately perceiving external forces applied to the robot requires filtering and thus significant time delay. An alternative approach has been suggested in recent literature: predicting contact and actuator forces simultaneously under the assumptions of rigid body dynamics, rigid contact, and friction. Existing such inverse dynamics approaches have used approximations to the contact models, which permits use of fast numerical linear algebra algorithms. In contrast, we describe inverse dynamics algorithms that are derived only from first principles and use established phenomenological models like Coulomb friction. We assess these inverse dynamics algorithms in a control context using two virtual robots: a locomoting quadrupedal robot and a fixed-based manipulator gripping a box while using perfectly accurate sensor data from simulation. The data collected from these experiments gives an upper bound on the performance of such controllers in situ. For points of comparison, we assess performance on the same tasks with both error feedback control and inverse dynamics control with virtual contact force sensing.
A Parallel Corpus of Translationese
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

We describe a set of bilingual English--French and English--German parallel corpora in which the direction of translation is accurately and reliably annotated. The corpora are diverse, consisting of parliamentary proceedings, literary works, transcriptions of TED talks and political commentary. They will be instrumental for research of translationese and its applications to (human and machine) translation; specifically, they can be used for the task of translationese identification, a research direction that enjoys a growing interest in recent years. To validate the quality and reliability of the corpora, we replicated previous results of supervised and unsupervised identification of translationese, and further extended the experiments to additional datasets and languages.